Mysterious Glow

From Metafilter, Oct. 26:

“I am only ashamed that I waited this many months to act. I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.” In a blistering letter that calls out some church lies, "Crash" director Paul Haggis quits Scientology after 35 years over its support for Prop 8. He says he was also influenced by this acclaimed St Pete Times series. The high level defection comes as ABC began running a multipart expose of the church that included choice video of Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis storming off when asked about the alien lord Xenu.

My comments: It’s hard not to notice the tactic that Scientology spokesman, Tommy Davis, is using. When confronted with their own absurdity, religions have learned to say Oh! I am SOOOO offended. That cuts me to my very soul. I can’t believe you asked me that? I wouldn’t be surprised if Scientology petitions the United Nations to denounce any questions on the Galactic Lord Xenu as blasphemous. Another religion, much more popular than Scientology, is doing similar things on the world stage to stifle criticism.

There is an interesting article in the Telegraph which talks of the curious Chinese practice of “ghost brides.”

Five people have been arrested in China for digging up the corpse of a young woman to be a “ghost bride” for a man killed in a car crash.

…

The suspects included a grieving father who allegedly paid his four accomplices around £2,700 pounds to find a female to be his son’s companion in the afterlife.

The men were caught after unearthing the remains of a teenage girl who had poisoned herself after failing her university entrance exams last year, a newspaper in Xianyang in China’s Shaanxi province reported.

As strange as this sounds, to me anyway, the article goes on to talk about a gang who killed girls to turn them into ghosts. This doesn’t make sense to me, considering the sheer amount of available girls from recorded and unrecorded history that really should be available for the newly arrived ghost to marry. Seems like there is no need to make some fresh ones.

The Chinese conception of an afterlife seems to this untrained eye to be pretty much a continuation of this one. Although, not as much fun. I think it is similar to what the Ancient Greeks thought of, that people don’t go to a place of leisure like the Christian heaven, or a hedonistic and sensual place like the Islamic afterlife, but kind of a sad and shadowy realm. It is no wonder that Chinese Emperors were interested in immortality.

At my Asian market, they sale . Hell Money. They are beautiful “fake” money with huge denominations of a billion ga-zillion dollars. The term “hell” is a mistranslation from Christian missionaries who said that people would “go to Hell when they die.” My Hell Money has that written on it, but I think I’ve seen new money with Heaven written on it. In any case, when a loved one dies, the money is reverently burned and that way this will give the person some spending money in the afterlife. Again, this is different from the Western idea, of a place of leisure. No Elysian Fields of wheat that comes up from the ground that doesn’t need to be tended. It is back to work for the Chinese ghost.

Since China has the nasty habit of aborting all female babies in the womb, I wonder if they will extend the practice of Ghost Brides a bit further. In other words, China will soon run out of living girls for living guys to marry. Men will have to start marrying ghosts in the future.

In the future, Ghost Wives will say things like this complete with woooo-ing ghost noises:

“Wooooo woooo! woooo! Pick up your shoes out of the living room please wooooo!”

“Get off my back! I work hard in the fields all day and you just criticize everything I do!”

“woooWOOOOwooo You really embarrassed me at my ghost sister’s house last night.”

And so on.

UPDATE: After looking at this more carefully, I’m sad to say, that no criminal accountability will happen.

After seeing a few articles in the today’s press, I’m hopeful that there may be a kind of justice for abuse victims of the Magdalene Asylums and other Irish reform schools, which were really prisons whose unstated goal was to abuse and harm as many children as possible.

To call this a “scandal” is an understatement. What happened in these “schools” is a crime against humanity.

I first became aware of this issue,when I saw the documentary, with the unnecessarily prurient title, Sex in a Cold Climate. These atrocities committed on these youngsters and teenagers have nothing to do with sex at all. The documentary chronicles the lives and abuse of unwed mothers who were forced to work in Magdalene laundries. They were veritable slaves, and their lives were made miserable by the physical and sexual abuse of the clergy that ran the place. Some of it so vile, that I feel uncomfortable describing what they did to these kids. These nuns and priests were really some of the worst people to ever be alive in the 20th century, and are on par with concentration camp guards, for that is what they were.

Magdalene Asylums were ostensibly created to help unwed mothers, but they were really a vehicle for forced labor. If a girl was suspected of being promiscuous she might wind up there. Sometimes, a girl in Ireland could be arrested just for being pretty and thrown in one of these work prisons. Many women never got out of these prisons.

There was a very good film called The Magdalene Sisters, which is about this terrible mark on Irish history. An excellent film, but some have criticized it for actually downplaying the abuse these girls endured. As bad as the abuse in that film is, the previously mentioned documentary does not skirt the issue at all.

I don’t want to discuss the theological implications of this, but no one can argue that the events in these reform schools were somehow even remotely divinely inspired.